July 2014

What cell phone ownership says about poverty in America

Not too long ago, cell phones were considered a luxury or even a status symbol. Now, mobile phones are an increasingly basic necessity for Americans of all income levels.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control finds that the majority of households in poverty also are cell phone-only homes -- the only economic group studied for which that's true.

Pew breaks down the data on its Fact Tank blog, showing not only that the poorest Americans tend to be the ones most likely to be cell-phone-only, at 56 percent, but that younger adults also are generally more likely to be entirely wireless.

Of course, it's not that it's only poorer Americans who are increasingly going landline-free; the share of all income groups and age groups going cell-phone-only have generally trended upward since 2007 -- today, nearly 40 percent of all US adults live in cell-phone-only homes, up from 11 percent in 2007. But the poorest Americans have remained the most likely to be cell-phone-only throughout this period, and have inched away from non-poor adults.

Tech CEOs push billions for Wi-Fi in schools

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Netflix’s Reed Hastings and HP’s Meg Whitman are among the tech CEOs urging the Federal Communications Commission to provide billions for Wi-Fi in schools and libraries.

The FCC is voting at its upcoming monthly meeting on a plan from Chairman Tom Wheeler to boost Wi-Fi in schools and libraries.

“The message from America is clear, if our schools do not have the broadband they need, our students will not be able to compete in the global economy,” the CEOs told FCC commissioners.

Signatories also included current and former CEOs of YouTube, eBay, Adobe, Airbnb, Dell, Intuit, OpenTable, Salesforce.com, Xerox and prominent venture capital firms.

Chairman Wheeler’s plan would put $5 billion toward providing and upgrading Wi-Fi services and equipment over the next five years on top of the agency’s $2.4 billion annual budget for the E-Rate program, which works to connect schools and libraries to the Internet. The agency has already set aside the first $2 billion and plans to provide the following $3 billion through eliminating inefficiencies in the program and phasing out non-Internet access services, including pagers.

FCC Item Provides Clip Captioning Flexibility

The Federal Communications Commission will give broadcasters and cable operators some flexibility when it comes to adding time-sensitive and "advanced" online clips to their closed captioning responsibilities, but will apply the same quality standards it applies to full-length TV shows and their full-length online incarnations.

Level3 Wants FCC to Impose ISP Interconnection Requirements

Level3 Communications wants the Federal Communications Commission to impose interconnection requirements on Internet service providers -- a move the company said is necessary to “fully protect the free and open Internet.”

The company recommends three specific ISP interconnection requirements. Mooney said Level3 already has similar arrangements with several ISPs and “the solution is good for everyone.”

Level3’s proposed ISP interconnection requirements include:

If a content provider or a network operator providing connectivity for the content provider delivers content into the ISP’s local market closest to the location of the ISP’s customer requesting the content, the ISP should be required to deliver the traffic to its customer without charging an interconnection fee -- provided that the content provider delivers a certain amount of traffic in the aggregate to the ISP.
The ISP would be able to select the interconnection location but selections would have to be “reasonable.” For example, each location would have to serve a minimum number of the ISP’s customers and the location would have to be served by several different metro transport service providers to ensure that the ISP has competitive choices.
If interconnection capacity becomes congested at any interconnection location, it would have to be promptly augmented.

Dear Secretary Duncan: Network Neutrality is an Education Issue

If comedian John Oliver can get the importance of network neutrality, then our US Department of Education should too.

New America’s Learning Technologies Project sent a letter to Secretary Arne Duncan urging him to recognize the risks posed to students’ educational opportunities under the new proposal from the Federal Communication Commission.

The proposal would essentially authorize “fast lanes” for online transmission of information, a move away from the approach known as net neutrality. The letter accompanied a series of comments submitted to the FCC on behalf of four education start-up companies: Codecademy, CodeCombat, GeneralAssembly, and OpenCurriculum.

Could Text Messages to Parents Help Close the ‘Word Gap’?

[Commentary] It works with diabetes patients, smokers trying to quit, and others: a text message reminding you to take your medication or resist the urge to light up. There’s even a Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University devoted to the idea. So what if we could put that same idea to work boosting literacy in very young children in low-income families?

That’s the premise of Parent University, a six-week program originally designed by Chris Drew, now Director of Educator Initiatives at Digital Promise. The program gives parents a digital tap on the shoulder via text messages reminding them to interact with their kids to boost literacy -- and close that ever-widening word gap. And it’s working, according to a recent, not-yet-published study that compared parents who received the program to those who didn’t.

Ample research shows that low-income kids enter school already behind their more affluent peers. As the now famous “word gap” study by Hart and Risley in the mid-1990s showed, by the age of 3, children born into low-income families have heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers.

Parent University aims to help parents create that rich literacy environment. The program, which is being studied by researchers at Northwestern University, is designed to help families promote literacy at home with ideas and prompts.

[Ray is a writer and editor living in Chicago, and owner of Hiredpen]

Verizon Releases Transparency Report for First Half 2014

Verizon released our Transparency Report for the first half of 2014. We’ve tried to include more data and more specificity. We hope that this Report will add to the ongoing discourse about government demands for customer data and, more generally, about privacy and public safety. Although we continue to receive large numbers of demands, the overall percent of our customers affected remains very small.

We received more subpoenas than any other type of legal process in the first half of the year in the United States, but those approximately 72,500 subpoenas sought information regarding only approximately one tenth of one percent of our United States customers. Moreover, each subpoena typically seeks information about a small number of customers: ninety percent of the subpoenas sought information about three or fewer customers. In fact, the average number of customers whose information was demanded through a single subpoena was less than two. We also continue to take positions in support of privacy that are not as public.

While it may not make the headlines, Verizon commonly pushes back against legal demands, forcing law enforcement agencies to narrow the scope of their requests, correct errors in their demands, or issue a different form of legal process before we will produce a specific type of data. Through these processes we rejected a number of demands from law enforcement completely and did not produce some of the information sought through other law enforcement demands.

Ballmer Buying Clippers Shows Sports Is Must-See in Media

“Sports is still a great unifier of people,” said Brian Rolapp, chief operating officer of National Football League Media and Harvard Business School graduate who previously worked in media investment banking at CIBC World Markets. “I don’t want to sound like an old man, but it seems like there’s fewer of those things, and there’s something very powerful about that.”

The challenge for league commissioners and team owners like former Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer, who has agreed to buy basketball’s Los Angeles Clippers for an NBA record $2 billion, is turning that power into profit.

“If you look at a lot of teams that have traded hands, the predominant cash flow of all these sports leagues are the media revenue,” Rolapp said. That’s no longer just the television set, which historically has been the principal method of delivering sports.

“You’re seeing the digital space, social media and streaming events, content in other forms increasing in dramatic numbers in terms of growth, and that’s made sports and sports franchises more valuable,” said National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman, who in 2013 signed a 12-year, $4.9 billion contract with Rogers Communications.

Copyrights are more than just federal “privileges.”

[Commentary] On July 1st, the American Enterprise Institute’s panel discussion, Copyrights and Innovation: Understanding the Debate, provided a good overview of the differing perspectives of copyright skeptics and supporters.

However, one set of closing remarks made a critical mistake worth correcting. It was argued that US copyrights are mere “privileges,” because they are protected only by a federal statute -- not by the state common-law claims (and statutes) that protect other private property rights. It was thus argued that if Congress repealed the federal copyright act, then the “privilege” of copyrights would cease to be legally protected by US laws.

But this copyright-is-just-a-federal-privilege argument suffers from at least two fatal defects.

First, it just got US copyright law dead wrong. Some copyright skeptics make this error because the Supreme Court, in Wheaton v. Peters, rejected the idea of federal common-law copyrights.

Second, the idea of abolishing the private copyrights of authors is not really some innovative, liberating, thought-experiment recently concocted by copyright-skeptical academes.

Developed representative democracies like the United States now usually rely on four cultural systems to produce expressive works: (1) an academic system; (2) a philanthropic system; (3) direct government funding of particular works; and (4) a commercial-production system. Copyright laws can interact with all four systems, but they are indispensable only to the fourth -- the commercial-production system.

[Sydnor is a visiting fellow with AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy]

Why Facebook is beating the FBI at facial recognition

If you're worried about Big Brother and computerized facial recognition, you’ve had plenty of reason to be scared. Law enforcement has been toying with facial recognition for a while, but the FBI is getting set to deploy its own system, called Next Generation Identification (NGI for short), planned to be fully operational soon.

NGI will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year. After years of relative anonymity, it's easy to think 2014 is the year that law enforcement will finally know you by face. B

t here's an inconvenient fact about the FBI's shiny new system: Thanks to extensive work by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we actually know quite a bit about NGI, and the numbers suggest it isn't very good at recognizing faces. Given a suspect's face, NGI returns a ranked list of 50 possibilities, and only promises an 85 percent chance of returning the suspect's name in the list. To put it another way, even when you give NGI 50 guesses, it still lets one in seven suspects off the hook.

Compare that to Facebook's DeepFace system, recently presented at the IEEE Computer Vision conference, and it looks even worse. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they're the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot.

To be fair, Facebook has a whole network's worth of data on its side, so it ends up comparing each face to a smaller number of possibilities. It isn’t an exact comparison, but the overall impression is hard to deny: the nation's most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.

Benton

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